It’s the end of the millennium, downtown Leningrad, a drunken Boris Yeltsin babbling on the TV.

Law and order has collapsed, giving way to rule of strongest. The oligarchs are taking over — factory workers don’t get paid. Instead, gangsters and an untrained paramilitary beat them into submission.

Thrust into this world are four young toughs, best friends, fearless and nihilistic. They work for OMON, the corrupt local police. They cruise along the city’s grand boulevards in a broken down jalopy.

One of them falls in love with a beautiful woman dressed in white at a local night club. But his easy life of drunken brawls is heading for disaster when he discovers his dream girl is the girlfriend of a gangster boss.

I’m talking about BREAK LOOSE, a new movie that had it’s world premier at the Toronto International Film Festival last night. I caught up with Alexey Uchilev — the well-known Russian filmmaker famous for epics like THE EDGE — at TIFF13.

He talks about changes to Russia, fatalism, censorship, A Clockwork Orange, and more.